dumb cabal question

[Frederik Eaton]

On Sun, Sep 04, 2005 at 08:01:48PM -0700, Isaac Jones wrote:
> The reason to combine them is that the point of abstraction between
> the compilers / interpreters lives in areas like "preprocess this
> file", "build this file", "install this library", not in operations
> like you mentioned:

I mentioned the second two of those, but not the first one.
Preprocessing files, however, doesn't sound like an operation that
needs to be done in a compiler/interpreter-specific way.

> > There would be operations such as: compile a file into an object
> > file (may be a no-op); link a bunch of object files into a package;
> > install a package into the following package database; create an
> > empty package database; merge two package databases; find
> > dependencies of a module. And options like: use the following other
> > packages, search for packages in the following package database.
> 
> Each of these operations would be a no-op for Hugs, and yet the
> abstraction layer that Cabal provides works quite well for Hugs.  I
> think that if we had built a standard command-line interface between
> compilers, GHC and Hugs would have almost disjoint operations, and
> Cabal would still have to perform the same amount of work, since it
> couldn't actually use this interface to get its job done.

-- 
http://ofb.net/~frederik/